The Very Best of Tad Williams (27 page)

“Hey, you were supposed to have the day off.” I scrabbled in the filing cabinet for the aspirin. “How’s your mom?”

Tilly gave me one of her looks. She’d probably noticed the pyramid of beer bottles I’d made on my desk. “If I stayed away from here a whole day, this place would just disappear under the dust like Pompeii. Mom’s fine. Her gums are still sore. I’ve been overheating the blender making her milkshakes all afternoon.” She paused to contemplate a noodle that had fallen onto her sweater, where it lay like a python that had died climbing Everest. “By the way, who the hell is Emily Heltenbocker?”

“Client.” I said it casually, although it was a word that had not been uttered within those walls for some time. “Also Charlie Helton’s daughter. Why?”

“She left a message for you. Poor old Charlie—that was a real shame. Anyway, she says she’ll be here at seven, and you should wear a clean shirt.”

I did not dignify this with a reply.

“Oh, and two different reporters called—someone from
The Metropolitan
, and a guy from
Defective Astronomer Gazette
.”

“Astrology and Detective,”
I said absently, wondering what could have made me the center of such a media whirlwind.
The Metropolitan
was actually a rather high-toned organ: they only printed their car-accident pictures in black and white, and they ran tiny disclaimers underneath the alien abduction stories. I swallowed a few more aspirin and went to meet the press.

A couple of quick calls revealed that both had contacted me about the Charlie Helton Mystery, aka
“The Magical Murder Manuscript.”
Apparently the missing book angle had been leaked by Charlie’s lawyer and was developing into a fair bit of tabloid froth. Some hack from
The Scrutinizer
called while I was still working my way through the first two. By the time I had finished my bout of semi-official spokesmanship—not forgetting to remind them all that Pinnard was spelled with two “n”s, but Pinardo (as in “the Magnificent”) with only one—Tilly leaned in the door to tell me “my date” was waiting.

(There is a certain hideous inevitability to what happens when Tilly meets one of my female clients, at least if that client is under sixty years of age. It is useless to protest that I have no romantic interest in them—Tilly only takes this as evidence of my hopelessly self-deluding nature. As far as she’s concerned, any roughly nubile woman who has even the most cursory business relationship with me falls into one of two categories: shallow gold-diggers prospecting in my admittedly rather tapped-out soil, or blindingly out-of-my-league “classy ladies” over whom I am fated to make a dribbling fool of myself. Only the sheer lack of recent clients of any sort had caused me to forget this, otherwise I would have been sure to meet Charlie’s daughter downstairs in front of the laundromat, at whatever cost to dignity.)

All unknowing, Emily Heltenbocker had greatly increased the likelihood of such a reaction by wearing a rather touchingly out-of-date cocktail frock for our nightclub sojourn. The black dress showed an interesting but not immodest amount of cleavage, so Tilly had immediately sized her up as a Number One.

“I’ll just stick around for a while to keep out the repossession people,” she informed me helpfully as I emerged. “Don’t worry, boss. I won’t let them take that urn with your mother’s ashes like they did last time you went bust.” She turned to Emily. “Call me sentimental, but I think however far in debt someone is, those loan sharks should stick to reclaiming furniture, not late relations.”

I winced, not so much at the all-too-true reference to my financial state as at the unfortunate subject of dead relatives, but Emily appeared to take no notice of my assistant’s
faux pas
. “What a loyal employee,” she cooed. I thought I detected a touch of acid beneath the sweetness. “She’s clearly been with the firm forever. Well, she should still get back in time for Ovaltine and the evening news—even if the repo men drop by tonight, it shouldn’t take them long to collect this lot.”

Tilly raised an eyebrow in grudging approval—she liked an opponent who could return serve. Before some thundering new volley was delivered, I grabbed Emily’s arm and pulled her toward the stairs.

Did I mention that there’s been a slight problem with the elevator lately?

“At least the shirt looks like it was ironed at some point,” she said. “Mid-seventies, maybe?”

She was driving. Her style refuted my ideas of what a schoolteacher would be like behind the wheel, and in fact rather enlarged the general concept of “driving.” Apparently, many of the other motorists felt the same: we had traveled across town through an 1812 Overture of honking horns, squealing brakes, and occasional vivid remarks loud enough to be heard even through our rolled-up windows.

I chose to ignore her comment about my shirt and concentrated instead on clinging to my seat with one hand while using the other to leaf through the autopsy report which Emily had somehow procured. (Privately, I suspected a coroner’s clerk with guilty schoolboy memories.)

Nothing in the report seemed to differ greatly from what I had read in the papers. Karl Marius Heltenbocker, aka Charlie Helton, had been in his early sixties but in good physical health. Death was due to exsanguination, the agent of same having been a large and very sharp steel sword of the type known as a cavalry saber. A few rough drawings showed the position of the body as it had been found inside the basket, and a note confirmed that paramedics had declared the victim dead at the scene. The verdict was death by misadventure, and both autopsy and summary report were signed by George Bridgewater, the county’s coroner-in-chief. If anyone in authority suspected it was a murder, it certainly wasn’t reflected in the official paperwork.

“It sure looks like an accident,” I said, wincing slightly as a pedestrian did a credible Baryshnikov impression in his haste to give Emily right-of-way through a crosswalk.

“Of course it does. If you were going to murder someone and steal his manuscript to protect yourself, Mister Pinnard, wouldn’t you
want
it to look like an accident?” She said this with an air of such logical certainty that I was reminded of my firm conviction during my student years that all teachers were extraterrestrials.

“How fiendishly clever,” I replied. I admit I said it quietly. I was saving my wittier ripostes until there was pavement under my feet again.

I hadn’t been to the Rabbit Club in a while, and was faintly depressed at the changes. I suppose on the salary the school board forked out Emily didn’t get out much, because she seemed quite taken with the place. Actually, set against the rather faded glories of the club—its heyday had roughly paralleled that of the Brooklyn Dodgers—she looked far more natural than me in my leather jacket and jeans. With her strapless cocktail dress and horn-rimmed glasses, she might have been sent over by Central Casting.

As I mused, she said something I didn’t quite catch, and I realized I had stopped in the middle of the aisle to admire her shoulders (I have always been a sucker for a faint dusting of freckles). I hurried her toward a booth.

The show was not the sort to make anyone sit up in wonder, but the club was one of the few places left in town where young magic talent could get a start. Looking around the darkened room, I felt a certain nostalgia for my own rookie days. Over the following hour we watched a succession of inexperienced prestidigitators fumble bouquets out of their sleeves and make coins jump across the backs of their hands while hardly ever dropping them. I nursed a soda water—rewarded for my choice with a restrained smile from my companion—but Emily drank two and a half glasses of champagne and applauded vigorously for one of the least sterling examples of the Floating Rings I’d ever seen. I decided sourly that the young (and rather irritatingly well-built) magician’s no-shirt-under-the-tux outfit had influenced her appreciation.

After the break, during which the tiny house band wheezed through a couple of Glenn Miller numbers, Fabrizio Ivone was announced. The headliner had not changed much since the last time I’d seen him. He was a little older, of course, but aren’t we all? His patter was delivered with a certain old-world formality, and his slicked-down hair and tiny mustache made him seem a remnant of the previous century. Watching him work his effortless way through a good group of standard illusions, it was easy to forget we were living in an era of jumbo jets and computers and special effects movies. When he finished by producing a white dove from a flaming Chinese lacquer box, the smallish crowd gave him an enthusiastic ovation.

I took Emily backstage on my arm (at this point she was a wee bit unsteady on her pins) and quickly located the dressing room. Ivone was putting his brilliantined hair, or at least the part that wasn’t real, back in its box.

“The world of Illusion,” said Emily, and giggled. I squeezed her wrist hard.

“That was a splendid show, Mister Ivone. I don’t know if you remember me—we worked a bill together in Vegas about ten years ago, at the Dunes I think it was. Dalton Pinnard—Pinardo the Magnificent?”

“Ah, of course.” He looked me up and down and went back to taking off his makeup. He didn’t look like he cared much one way or the other.

“And this is my friend, Emily Heltenbocker.” I took a breath and decided to go for the direct approach. “Her father was Charlie Helton.”

A plucked eyebrow crept up that eggshell dome of a forehead. “Ah. I was sad to hear about him.” He sounded about as sorry as he’d seemed glad to see me again.

“We were wondering if you might know anything about the book he was writing,” said Emily. “Somebody stole it.” She gifted Ivone with a dazzling smile. It was a good smile, but I couldn’t match it since I was wincing at her sledgehammer approach.

The old magician gave her a look he probably used more often on sidewalk dog surprises. “I heard it was full of slanders. I am not unhappy to hear it has been stolen, if that were to be the end of it, but I have no doubt it will soon appear in the gutter press. If you are asking me if I know anything about this sordid affair, the answer is no. If you are insinuating I had anything to do with the theft, then you will be speaking to my lawyer.”

I trod ever so gently on Emily’s foot, preparing to steer the conversation in a friendlier direction. My new initiative was delayed somewhat by the wicked elbow she gave me back in the solar plexus. When I could breathe again, I said: “No, Mister Ivone, we don’t think any such thing. We were just hoping that you might be able to tell us anything you know about Charlie’s relationship with other magicians. You know, so we can decide once and for all if there’s anything sinister in the disappearance. But you, sir, are of course above suspicion.”

He stared at me for a moment and I wondered if I’d overdone it. The cold cream was caked in his wizened features like a bad plastering job. “I would never harm anyone,” he said at last, “but I must say that I did not like your father, young woman. Even in the Savini Academy—yes, we studied together—he was never serious. He and his friends, they were all the time laughing in the back row.”

“And who were his friends in the Academy?”

Ivone shrugged. “I do not remember. Pranksters, guttersnipes, not true artists. He was the only one of that sort who graduated.”

I let out a breath. So if Charlie had known the other two men at school, they hadn’t been close chums.

Ivone was still in full, indignant flow. “He did not show the respect for our great tradition, not then, not later. Always he was making jokes, even when he was on the stage, silly riddles and stories, little puzzles as though he were performing to entertain children.” He placed his toupee in its box as carefully as if it were the relic of some dead saint, and solemnly shut the lid. “I have appeared before the crowned heads of Europe and Asia in my day, and never once on the stage have I made a joke.”

I didn’t doubt him for a moment.

“I wish you’d kept your mouth shut,” I said. It didn’t come across as forceful as it sounds, since Emily had already pulled away from the curb and I was frantically groping on the floor for the other half of my seatbelt.

“Don’t be rude—you’re an employee, remember. Besides, I didn’t like him. He was a very small-souled man.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not the point. After you’d just gone and blurted that out about the book he wasn’t going to give anything away. I couldn’t very well ask him where he’d been when your dad died, for instance.”

Emily made a face. “But I know that already. He was onstage at the Rabbit Club—he’s been performing there for weeks. I checked.”

“What?”

“I checked. I called the Performing Artist’s Guild after you told me his name. He was working the night my father was killed.”

I stared. The trained fingers I had once insured (okay, only for five thousand bucks on a twenty-six-dollar monthly premium—it was a publicity stunt) itched to throttle her, or at least to pull those stupid glasses off and see if she drove any better without them.

“He was
working
? Fabrizio Ivone, this supposed murderer, was on the other side of town pulling coins out of people’s noses when your father died?”

“Yes, I just told you that I called the Guild. Don’t get so defensive—I didn’t expect you to do all the work, just the stuff that needed expert knowledge.”

I threw myself back against my seat, but our sudden stop in the middle of an intersection catapulted me forward again microseconds later. “I can’t believe I’m wasting my time on this nonsense,” I growled. The light had turned green again, but Charlie’s daughter seemed to be waiting for a shade she liked better. “The point I’m making, Emily, is that Fabrizio Ivone has an
alibi
. As in, ‘Release this honest citizen, Sergeant, he’s got an alibi.’”